Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

January 21, 2019

I usually wait for at least three sightings of a phenomenon to declare a trend. But in the case of gambit, I decided that two big, unrelated occurrences within a single week were sufficient. They were certainly enough to start me scurrying down multiple rabbit holes, etymological and cultural.

March 08, 2018

As trademark lawyers love to remind us, distinctiveness is a paramount goal of brand naming. A name doesn’t need to be original – consider Dove deodorant and Dove chocolate — but it does need to stand out in its category.

But can a name ever be too distinctive – too much of an outlier to connect with its intended audience?

I recently spoke with a business owner via Clarity, the expert-advice service, who wanted my opinion on a name that was distinctive in the extreme. This person, a graphic designer in the Pacific Northwest, was dissatisfied with her current business name, which combines her initials with “design.” She’d come up with a new name and, she told me in an introductory email, had already bought a couple of domains associated with it. The name she wanted my opinion on: MOZZAFIATO.

Mozza-what?

It sounded distinctive, all right. It also sounded like nothing I’d ever heard of. Google Translate told me mozzafiato is an Italian word meaning “breathtaking,” which is nice but not helpful. How was this name going to help the designer grow her business?

October 06, 2017

Last week I took the Coast Starlight to Seattle, a city I hadn’t visited in decades, and Vancouver, BC, where I’d never been at all. The journey was leisurely and scenic, the weather was mild and dry, and the political climate shift after I crossed the border was startling in the best possible way. I don’t think I’d fully appreciated how exhausting it has been, over the last 18 months or so, to live in the U.S. until I found myself in a country where sanity and courtesy appear to be the norm.

Oh, and I did some brand-spotting. The theme: portmanteaus, good and bad.

April 20, 2017

Recreational cannabis has been sold legally in Oregon since October 1, 2015; since January 1, 2017, dispensaries have been required to apply for and receive licenses from the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. In early January, the Portland Business Journal reported* that the OLCC had received 1,907 recreational marijuana license applications in 2016, and that the total number of licensed retailers had more than doubled in 2016, from 99 to 260.**

One of those green rush beneficiaries is Serra, which opened its first store in Portland in 2016 and which now operates a second Portland store as well as one in Eugene, home of the University of Oregon.

The stores have been praised for their high-end aesthetics (“The most sophisticated cannabis dispensary in the city, if not the country: – Wallpaper. “When you leave Serra, the feeling is similar to leaving Anthropologie: slightly numbed by the curated beauty of the place, a sense of being underdressed, but without the guilt of paying too much for something you'll ruin in one smoke sesh” – the Potlander, which is not a typo). And the verbal identity is similarly bar-raising: no“leaf” pun, no 420 variation, no “green,” no “bud,” no “Mary Jane.”

October 17, 2016

Risotto: “An Italian dish of rice cooked in stock with ingredients such as vegetables and meat or seafood” (OED). The dish is associated with northern Italy and particularly Milan (risotto milanese). From Italian riso (rice) and the diminutive suffix -otto. ItalyHeritage.com offers alternate etymologies: “Some say it came from an exclamation of Frederick Barbarossa, who praised a ‘Risum optimum’; others maintain it derived from a term used by the Insubres, the Celts that inhabited Lombardy, ‘risott.’”

Risotto was in the news last week because of a tidbit in Democratic National Committee chair John Podesta’s emails, which were hacked and released by WikiLeaks. Business Insider’s Allan Smith tweeted the revelation:

September 19, 2016

Mountebank: A charlatan; a seller of quack medicines who attracts customers with stories, jokes, or tricks; a con artist. From Italian monta im banco, one who gets up on a bench (to speak). Pronounced with three syllables.

I’m imagining the members of the New York Times editorial board debating which of several synonyms to use in the lead editorial of September 16, headlined “Donald Trump’s Latest Birther Lie” – “Mr. Trump’s Birther Nonsense” in the print edition – before settling on mountebank.

The midday bulletin arrived as another bizarre moment in the absurdist presidential campaign of Donald Trump: News Alert: Trump admits Obama was born in the United States.

What? It read like some variation on “Trump Finds the Earth No Longer Flat.” But no, Mr. Trump, the ultimate mountebank, was at it again, altering but not abandoning the Big Lie campaign that first made him the darling of wing nuts and racists five years ago: his vicious insistence that President Obama was not born a legitimate American citizen.

It’s a double whammy, folks! Numero uno, another candidate in the Near-Profanity Sweepstakes, F-word division. It’s a category already overpopulated with entries like Fresh ’n’ Easy’s “It’s about time life was this f’n easy” and Booking.com’s “Look at the booking view!” (For more, see my post from June 2013.)

And numero two-o, it’s another example of the funny uses of funin the language of commerce. We’ve seen comparative fun (funner), superlative fun (funnest), and even super-comparative fun (funner-er). Now Toyota has transformed fun into a reflexive imperative verb.

You may recall that Toyota isn’t the first mass brand to hop on the F train. Last year Jell-O verbed funin a boundary-pushing campaign called “Fun My Life.” The #FML hashtag made it clear that Jell-O knew exactly which boundaries it was pushing. Bye-bye, Bill Cosby.

Despite the boggling number of Urban Dictionary upvotes, FML does not mean “Fix My Lighthouse.”

What else can we say about Toyota’s creative effort? Well, the copy avers that “The spirit of playfulness is alive in this small car.” The spirit of punctuation, however, is on its last wobbly legs.

Sophisticated dramatically styled and compact. We’ve designed our best small car ever, now it’s time you got involved.

The idiocy of this slogan truly boggles the mind! I’m an avid user of the longer F word in the right context, but Toyota has shot itself in the foot with this one...not funny, not clever, won’t sell cars.

April 11, 2014

Arduinois “an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.” (Source: Arduino.cc.) The company was founded in 2005 in Ivrea, a town of about 25,000 in northern Italy; its products are popular in the worldwide maker community. The company is Arduino; its microcontroller board is “an Arduino.”

Arduino is a low-cost microcontroller board that lets even a novice do really amazing things. You can connect an Arduino to all kinds of sensors, lights, motors, and other devices and use easy-to-learn software to program how your creation will behave. You can build an interactive display or a mobile robot and then share your design with the world by posting it on the Net.

The first few times I encountered the Arduino name I associated it with “arduous,” which is not only conceptually inaccurate but historically and etymologically false. Arduino is not related to Latin arduus (high, steep). Rather, this very 21st-century company and its primary product are named for an 11th-century monarch who ruled for just two years.

Here’s how IEEE Spectrum tells the story:

The picturesque town of Ivrea, which straddles the blue-green Dora Baltea River in northern Italy, is famous for its underdog kings. In 1002, King Arduin became the ruler of the country, only to be dethroned by King Henry II, of Germany, two years later. Today, the Bar di Re Arduino, a pub on a cobblestoned street in town, honors his memory, and that’s where an unlikely new king was born.

The bar is the watering hole of Massimo Banzi, the Italian cofounder of the electronics project that he named Arduino in honor of the place.

The personal name “Arduino” is derived from the Germanic name, Harduwin or Hardwin, composed from hardu “strong, hardy” and wini “friend.” (Source.) It has cognates in French (Ardennes, site of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II) and English (the Forest of Ardenin Warwickshire, the setting of Shakespeare’s As You Like It).

Arduino uses the .cc domain extension, the country code for the tiny Cocos Islands, a territory of Australia. It’s the preferred domain of many Creative Commons (open source) projects—another example of when a non-dot-com domain is the more appropriate choice.

As for Ivrea, its name comes from the Latin “Eporedia.” Arduino isn’t the first technology company to have made its home there: the business-machine company Olivettiwas founded there (as a typewriter manufacturer) in 1908. Known for advanced industrial design, Olivetti was also a technology pioneer: the company’s Programma 101, released in 1965, is considered the first commercial desktop personal computer. Olivetti was sold to Telecom Italia in 2003 and rebranded as Olivetti Tecnost.

Ivrea is also known for a peculiar carnival celebration, the Battle of the Oranges, with roots in the 12th and 13th centuries. Fest 300, hotelier Chip Conley’s world-festivals website, describes it thus:

It’s a familiar story: commoners rise up against an oppressive ruler. At the Carnevale di Ivrea, however, the battle isn’t waged with guns and swords—oranges are the weapon of choice. Every year, the tiny northern city of Ivrea in the Turin province stockpiles 500,000 kilograms of fresh oranges for Battaglia delle Arance (Battle of the Oranges), a re-creation of a historic fight between townsfolk and a ruling tyrant. Teams wage a full-on fruit war, and not even a red-capped declaration of sovereignty can protect you from getting juiced.

The carnival is connected to the Christian calendar; this year it took place between March 2 and 4, the Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. But its rituals have pagan overtones:

The festival concludes with a sword-wielding Violetta watching over a scarlo, a pole with juniper and heather bushes. If the scarlo burns fast and bright, the future looks good; a slow burn is a bad omen for the coming year.

Here’s a lovely thing from the University of Nottingham’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures: Words of the World, a series of short videos in which language experts tell the stories of words adopted into English, from aficionado to zeitgeist. Click on a word in the crossword-like grid to learn its story. (Via Language Hat.)

And speaking of the history of English, whatever happened to the passival tense? Jane Austen used it in 1807 when she wrote in a letter: “The garden is putting in order.” But by the end of the 19th century that construction had been replaced by the progressive passive we use today (“The garden is being put in order”). Not without a lot of sturm und drang, though. I learned about it from Mike Vuolo, until recently the producer of NPR’s On the Media; he’s developing a podcast called Lexicon Alley to explore the byways of language and devotes an installment to the passival—much more fascinating than you’d guess. And here’s an older Language Log post about 19th-century outrage over the newfangled progressive passive. It was ever thus: language always changes, and people always hate change.

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Back in the world of commerce, the Olive Garden restaurant chain tried to introduce new dishes with Italian-sounding names—soffatelli and pastachetti—that turned out not to be Italian at all, just “rooted in Italian inspiration,” according to a spokeswoman. The fake names (falsetti?) flopped. Linguist Arnold Zwicky twirls a fork around the issue, and for good measure investigates pepperoni (another American invention) and diavolini.

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Cloth diaper brands: real or fake? Take the quiz at The Hairpin. (Footnote: For several years I wrote copy for a diaper-cover company called Biobottoms. I see the brand still exists, although under new ownership. Good product. And yes, we got endless grief over the Biobottoms name, for which I was not responsible.)

June 15, 2010

He disappeared from magazines about six months ago. But his quixotic saga lives on. In January, Rosetta Stone asked fans to continue the story of the farm boy and the model. By Jan. 29, when the contest ended, there were 286 stories on the Rosetta Stone site, most of them with happy endings.

But wait, there’s more! In December 2008, Minnesota Public Radio’s Jeff Horwich wrote a song about the farm boy/supermodel romance that he performed at a company cabaret. Nice rhyming of “impress her” and “undress her,” Jeff!

The hardworking farm boy even casts a shadow over a rival language-software company, Instant Immersion, which in recent weeks has been running this homage (oh, all right: low-rent knockoff) in The New York Times: